I'm so gullible. I just ran this Bash code, as found in someone's sig on Slashdot, just to see what it did:

:(){ :|:&};:

Anyone have any idea what it does? I just know it hogged my system and ground away at the hard disk, before I hit the Reset bitton :-) Shame I can't search for it; none of the search engines count it as a valid query.

Update

To answer my own question: I've now been informed about what I just inflicted upon my machine. It makes perfect sense if you realise that ':' isn't a special character - in this case, it's a function name. Imagine it replaced by 'foo'.